What is Poetry Flash? Well, that depends on what period you're asking about.

"The Literary Review and Calendar of the West," as it calls itself, has transformed itself often over the past 40 years, bringing the Bay Area literary community along with it. Now what many people call simply the Flash is on the verge of yet another evolution as it prepares to be honored this year by Litquake with that organization's prestigious Barbary Coast award.

Started by creative-writing students at San Francisco State University as an 8-by-14 mimeo listing of seven readings in November 1972, Poetry Flash became more than a calendar as early as the second issue, when founder Jon Ford published short, snarky event reviews that would make the Flash infamous. Simply having a sort of bulletin board people could depend on resulted in more readings and better attendance, as well as more conversation about the poetry itself and the Bay Area poetry scene.

"We were actually making it happen," says Joyce Jenkins, who has served as editor since 1978 and as publisher since 1980. "We were hand-collating each issue, and it kept getting bigger, and there kept being more events and more reviews." Jenkins has thick, free-flowing gray hair and thin, silver-rimmed glasses.

"You see, there wasn't the Internet; there wasn't anything like it. There was no place for people to go other than maybe an academic literary magazine or something like that, and so it really helped people. If they went out on a limb and said every Thursday we're going to gather at the Grand Piano, or Cody's, or some other place to have a series, the people who should know about it would know about it because they'd see it in the Flash."

Almost comically, the future of the Flash was threatened in 1978 due to an outstanding $75 bill from Hoover Printing Co., the mom-and-pop shop where the paper was assembled each month. Most of the Flash staff, overworked and exhausted, decided to quit. Richard Hoover offered to absorb the cost if he could take over as publisher, and Steve Abbott was willing to serve as editor and assemble a new team.

The new staff doubled circulation to 5,000 and implemented new features such as interviews with series coordinators and a column focused on which magazines were soliciting what sort of submissions. Poetry Flash also began to print letters from readers, making the poetry scene more of a dialogue than ever.

Started series

In 1982, the Flash started its own series, taking over the weekly readings at Cody's, which they've produced consistently ever since. Now alternating between Oakland's Diesel, A Bookstore and Moe's Books in Berkeley, they've outlasted three separate host bookstores.

Shortly after Jenkins took over, the editorial vision moved toward lengthier essays on books that, she says, "would never get that treatment anywhere else." In his introduction to "Reading the Sphere," a collection of critical essays originally published in Poetry Flash, Silberg explains that his mission, in part, has been "to bring poetries together, to set them sympathetically side by side in the pages."

"We just kept building it and tried," Jenkins says. "We really tried to make it as reliable and as solid and as all-encompassing as we could." She takes a rare pause. "We've definitely tried to create - and I think accomplished - a dialogue between those diverse, disparate elements of what essentially is a community, even if they don't realize it half the time."

Since 1981 Poetry Flash has supported the Northern California Book Awards, officially becoming its organizational home, awards producer, and fiscal sponsor in '96. Every year, an independent panel of volunteer book reviewers decides the best books published between Fresno and Oregon.

Environmental festival

Also annual is the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, which Poetry Flash created with Robert Hass when he was appointed U.S. poet laureate in 1995; the festival serves as a platform to talk about the relationship between writers and the environment.

Poetry Flash has appeared as a tabloid since 1983, when Jenkins decided that hand-stuffing 6,500 copies of 12 book-stock pages every month was not the best use of the staff's time. This made it possible for the Flash to more than triple its production, peaking at a circulation of over 22,000 copies per month. That ended at the close of 2007, when the publishing industry was crippled by the recession, and the Flash moved from a monthly to a quarterly schedule. Finally, in the winter of 2011, the Flash published its final quarterly in print.

Although the Flash has published a lot of online-only material since 2000, last June, it began publishing separate issues online as well as every month, reaching about the same number of people it did when it existed as a print tabloid.

New issues, biannual and designed to work in tandem with the website, will focus not on the calendar but on feature articles as well.

"You have to continually learn," Jenkins says. "You just have to keep learning and keep trying to find a way to make it work."

Throughout its many changes and incarnations, the mission of Poetry Flash remains unchanged: to build community through literary activity. What that means, and how that happens, is something you can find in a flash.